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Half of all kids in jail haven't yet been sentenced

ELEANOR HALL: Back home now, and Australia's Aboriginal children are 31 times more likely to spend time in jail than non-Indigenous children.

The latest analysis from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare show that the number of Indigenous children in detention is increasing.

The study also found that half of these children have not even been sentenced to a crime.

Jennifer Macey reports.

JENNIFER MACEY: On an average night across Australia there are just over 1,000 children in jail.

The Australian Institute of Health of Welfare has released a new report on the number of young people in detention over the last four years.

Tim Beard is the head of the Child Welfare and Prisoner Health Unit at the institute.

TIM BEARD: So we now have data going up to June quarter of 2012 and we've found a similar number to that reported for previous years and 1,024 young people were in detention on an average night in the June quarter.

And that number has actually been stable over the past four years, it's been around about 1,000 with minor fluctuations. The other thing to note is that we have Northern Territory and Western Australian data in this report whereas they haven't supplied data for the previous reports but we have supplied estimates for that.

But what we found is we still do see similar results to around about 1,000 at a national level.

JENNIFER MACEY: This means one in 3,000 children aged between 10 and 17 are spending time behind bars. But it's a lot higher for the Indigenous population, where one in 217 Indigenous kids are detained.

TIM BEARD: Yes that's right. The Indigenous population has seen an increase over the four year period, what we're seeing now is that from four years ago, when Indigenous young people were about 27 times as likely as non-Indigenous to be in detention on an average night, that's now up to 31 times the rate in June 2012.

JENNIFER MACEY: Do you have any clues as to why that gap isn't closing?

TIM BEARD: It really is hard to say just because we don't go into too much of the detail behind that but I guess what it basically comes down to is that there's a vulnerable population out there who are having multiple disadvantage upon them for a variety of reasons and a lot of its comes down to the fact that education levels are lower.

There's a lot of links to poverty and economic disadvantage and the fact that they haven't had the same opportunities as many other parts of the community. So it's not just within the Indigenous population but just because of their relative remoteness and relative disadvantage, it comes out very strongly in these data.

JENNIFER MACEY: The other disturbing trend identified in the report shows that half of all the 1,000 kids spending time in jail have not yet been sentenced.

Tim Beard again.

TIM BEARD: Yes, I guess on the surface that is an alarming number, but I guess the context behind that is that a lot of these unsentenced young people are actually in detention for a relatively short period of time.

So we find that they're on average in detention for a lot of the time only a few days while they're awaiting the outcome of a court case or they're waiting to appear in court, or they're waiting for sentencing.

So that has to be taken in that context, but it does actually on the surface look like an alarming rate because over half of the young people in detention on an average night are actually not yet sentenced or not sentenced at all.

JENNIFER MACEY: And he says despite some media reports showing that more girls are detained than young men, most of those young people behind bars are male.

TIM BEARD: Young men continue to be, you know, quite consistently represented as the vast majority of this population, so we find that over nine in 10 young people in detention are young men and that's consistent with the previous four years of data.

There's been a little bit of media over the last couple of years that young women are appearing more and more in the youth justice system but we've actually found that, you know, in terms of their rates we haven't actually seen a substantial increase in young women coming through the system.

It still tends to be the vast majority being male, especially the most serious elements in detention.

ELEANOR HALL: That's Tim Beard from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare ending that report by Jennifer Macey.